Love these set review videos. The one thing I wish you guys would add is a "Notable Cards" section. Just a section to talk about cards that are interesting for whatever reasons, but might not end up winning any awards at the end.
To be fair to Sleepy Scriptwriter Cedric, Island Sanctuary's art was originally commissioned as a land (along with Birds, the more well known half of this story). Mark Poole was telling us all about it in line at MC Chicago.
Good episode! As an observation about your gameplay videos, when you are using the overhead camera, Cedric is on the left and Patrick is on the right side of the screen. Then, when you change camera views to the face cam, the orientation changes so it looks like Patrick is on the left and Cedric is on the right. It's minorly confusing as a viewer. You might want to consider flipping the overhead camera and the playmat around 180 degrees so the two sides are consistant.
These are starting to get interesting now as we are talking about sets that came out after I left Magic. Mirage was the first after my time. Fun to go and hear about them now and what I missed
Great episode! Do I remember correctly that you guys used to have a most expensive card in the set award (when you were with SCG)? I remember that being one of my favorite awards, I would love if you brought it back!
I haven't been able to find it again but I recall a quote about Necro's inclusion in 5th Edition from one of WotC's design members: "Necro is a fair and balanced card we forsee being in the base set for a long time." I wish I could find that again to verify my memory, but I'm certain that got said. Didn't age well, did it? :p
I was excited for this set at the time, but mainly because of the new illustration for Black Knight as well as some of the Ice Age reprints. (I started playing around the release of Ice Age and didn't appreciate what I should be looking to get for my collection.)
Honestly, I have always considered the hardest thing in game design to be making the "bad" or inefficient cards due in part to most people's compulsion to make incredibly efficient cards. The balancing act between power levels, set theme/mechanics, and other card designers has to be incredibly hard to maintain a semblance of equilibrium.
I love the circle of protection arts from this set. I understand Patrick's objection that they don't look like white magic, but I think they look beautiful. It probably helps that I started playing around 6th edition, so those are the arts I'm used to.
Loved this ep. I think 5th Edition is a hidden trove of underrated Magic art. Sure, there were some dubious creations, but the new art for favorites like Unholy Strength, Zombie Master, Earthquake, Goblin King and Bad Moon go pretty hard. Ivory Cup and Lifetap are beautiful as well.
Y'all are certainly entitled to your opinions, but I love this set. I did start around this time, so obviously that skews my pov, but I thought this was a delightful set. They took the base set of cards and removed the genuinely problematic pieces (with, you know, exceptions, but it's an honest attempt) and then included a lot of the most interesting designs from the past few years of expansions. Not every card can be defended, but I think the mentality was good. And the new art is awesome. Almost universally, they're exciting, iconic pieces. Finally, I think this is when the formatting and frame really came into focus. Sure, the ruleset isn't quite developed enough yet (and Sixth Edition largely puts is in the zone of modern magic rules and should be lauded for such) but the wording has become professionally consistent and comprehensible in a way 4th edition hadn't quite figured out yet. And the frame is possibly my favorite it's ever been in the history of the game, still looking a lot like early Magic, but bright and clean.
Just want to say, but as the lone player in a group of spikes who LOVES to talk about the art of cards and my relationship with the aesthetics of the game (what reeled me in as a child was how evocative and strange so much of the pieces were), I appreciate the level of detail and insight Patrick brings to discussing the technique and effect of these art changes. Perceptive, concise, clear and funny: couldn't ask for more.
By this time I was an established tournament player, and we became snobs, we wouldn't use 5th edition cards with that 'weird art' but I liked draft and sealed deck with 5th , which became more popular every month and eventually I grew over it and could use a 5th City of Brass without flinching
Excellent ep!! One thing I'd like to add. The huge number of new artworks was a marketing point for the set, and something they tried to get players excited about. But even if a card did have improved art-let's say I prefered the new Aysen Bureaucrats-I still didn't consider it an upgrade, because it came with a white border and so was a gigantic eyesore no matter how good the art was. I did not want to replace my black bordered cards with any of these! You two brushed past the borders as a non-issue, but white borders were reviled back then and were absolutely a deterrent to purchasing product. This was the first set to came out during my years that (like Patrick) I didn't buy a single pack of.
I think you nail it here. I remember disliking a lot of the new art at the time, but in retrospect a lot of it is actually pretty good. But the white border really sours the whole esthetic. If you pair that same art with a black border it just looks so much better.
MTG content has come and gone for the past 6ish years.. but today I can safely say this is my number 1 series for MTG content ! Keep it up and going guys !
That game was actually surprisingly decent! I was expecting a slog, and it kinda was, but there was also just a lot of playing creatures and punching each other with them XD Which was surprising to me
I imagine this product got significant playtest time to make sure new players experienced the best starting experience possible. Ensuring the game didn't stall and had exciting swings and counters was their job and they did it well.
My first set! I think I got a Primal Clay and a Stampede or a Clockwork Beast as rares from the first starter (didn't know it until much later). The art was beautiful, even the basic lands very captivating. I think I got my first Rebecca Guay card in that starter, a Sea Sprite. Some of the instructions were quite difficult to grasp (especially if you didn't know English all that well), but series and batches fairly quickly got replaced by the stack. Can't wait to hear what you think!
Ok, after watching you were kinda harsh, but from a new player's perspective the set was quite exciting. I think that compared to the older cards the clearer templating was a huge step forward, and the new arts from Donato Giancola, Rebecca Guay, D. Alexander Gregory, or Mike Dringenberg really made you want to play with the cards. Even the Animate Wall, with Richard Kane Ferguson deciphering the art is part of the fun. :D I guess that the Chinese version with expansion symbol indicating rarity must have been printed after they thought of implementing it for Exodus, since Portal, Weatherlight, Tempest, and Stronghold still didn't get that treatment.
I was introduced to Magic through the Portal starter set. We got two decks and the manual walked us through the first game. It was a neat experience but moving on to real Magic was a leap haha... What's an enchantment? What's an artifact?
These are fun videos. As a kid I didn't really feel like 5th, or 6th edition were very worthwhile sequels to the ubiquitous 4th- 7th edition felt like an actual step forward with the new art, foils, and return of stronger cards.
Oh man, thanks for that info on the rule change around first turn and drawing. I started playing the game in the Ice Age/4th Ed era, stopped playing, and came back to the game around Dominaria. Thought I was crazy and misremembering but apparently there was an actual rules change.
I feel this a lot. I started with Beta, stopped from end of Ice Age until Stronghold, stopped just as 6th came out and came back for a month on MTGO during Innistrad, gave up on the game as cost prohibitive and came back midway through Dominaria United on Arena. I had to unlearn and relearn so much every time and even now can't stop griping about how much the online formats weird deck construction with their specific economic baggage but I've not enough time for even Bo3 on Arena let alone in person Friday nights.
To add on my colorless/generic mana comment. Cedric described Ashnod's Altar as adding two generic mana. Generic mana is not a thing that can be added. It is used in costs to denote that it can be paid with either colored or colorless mana, the only actual mana types. The distinction is really not that hard when you think about it a little :)
I love the series and I miss you guys in the SCG booth 😢. Two bits of feedback; first, your transitions between segments feel like they are designed for live syndicated TV networks with a commercial break. There is no need to announce what is “coming up next” and then declare that you are back after a 4 second transition. Just say “we’ll now get into the facts” and go straight into fact #1. Second, for the play segments, it would feel more natural if you moved the face cam to the other side of the table. That way, the player sitting on the left would be facing the right side of the screen when you cut to the face shot. With your current set up, the two perspectives are mismatched. Keep them coming! Lots of love
This isn't "watch a random game of Magic", it's "see what the Magic designers thought was the essence of Magic to bring people into the game". For me it really did capture that simple thrill of threat and answer without any worldbuilding to distract.
I'm surprised the guys weren't familiar with generic mana. It's good WotC made an effort to differentiate generic and colorless mana(since they are two completely different things!) in Oath of the Gatewatch, but it was definitely too late, since there still is so much confusion around the terms.
5th was something else... I remember my LCS owner actively telling people NOT to buy it and he had the same half box of it on his shelf for several years.
What I initially heard during the video message to Nick Miller (at 2x speed) was “at the Atlanta airport Karakas” which I couldn’t fit in to my understanding of the world.
The card shown at 1:13:04 doesn't actually have the misprint they're talking about. It's not the copyright symbol, it's that the "All rights reserved" bit turns into, "Todos os direitos reservados" on the affected cards. i was a bit confused until I googled it to find an example.
I remember an actual poll wotc did for cards to remove from 4th into 5th, and while most "winners" were going to be gome anyway, like Mind Twist, Cyclopean Mummy was on there too. This is one of the rare "players dont like" situations with teeth!
Also, judges hate 5th edition because in "cleaning up" card wordings they also outright changed some functionality, which no other set since has done. Also, new art for ankh of mishra is a windmill. Artist said they thought the brief asked for an "ark". Which... explains nothing? All in all a bit of a disaster.
I love Cyclopean Mummy. The dramatic irony in the flavor text adds an extra layer of horror to a classic movie monster. The name, art, and ability all match the concept too.
@@meekrab9027 Well I meant more, it's funny calling it Xhome when it's pretty much 80% or so island home, with a coulple swamp, forest and mountain homes. that be like calling reach, green reach or forest reach. Other cards ocasionally have it, but not enough to really make it a new mechanic.
5th, as large as the set was, was smaller than 4th + Chronicles (449 (434 unique) vs 378 (368 unique) + 125 (116 unique) ), so the card pool for Type II actually shrank with this set. Let's see where you guys put it -- I didn't really buy much then -- one starter deck and that was it -- and was not happy about the artwork changes. By this time I had mostly quit playing anything but casually, so I can't really comment on the rules changes as they applied here -- at least I played with the Mirage block. I didn't actually complete this set until very recently -- I went back and hunted down this set. And lets face it, the three new sets (vs 4th + Chroncles) integrated into this set were of low interest to players -- Fallen Empires, Ice Age, and Homelands were all still on the shelves. Finally, I like the card image gallery feature at the end, and that you actually show all the cards.
1:34:27 RKF is a phenomenal artist but his hyper-detailed style doesn't translate well to a tiny box on a playing card. Viewed in a larger format, his pieces are vivid and dynamic in a way that most MtG art isn't. His version of Jade Monolith is incredible.
I overlooked the mummy for years until I recently realized it's a zombie! It does pretty well in an Old School 93/94 Mono B zombie deck alongside Zombie Master.
Timeless is my favorite format on arena. I haven't run into necro decks enough to consider it a "problem," but if enough people play it restricting ritual/necro/both might be on the table one day. As of now I think not enough arena kids know about it
The most I remember mana burn ever mattering was when people were playing Eladamri's Vineyard in green decks as ramp that did damage to there opponent. The counterplay being to just run Mishra's Factory in any deck that couldn't consistently use 2 green mana during it's first main phase. I also genuinely loved the miserable slogs of resource wars that was 90s gameplay until we got the degenerate combo decks which also were hilarious. All my favourite things in Magic have been removed because according to Mark Rosewater, they were unfun and my opponent should get to play cards.
i can think of what design would do, pretty obvious. their job would be to make sure there are enough of each catagory of cards, make sure that they can synergize well, or not TOO well with surounding sets to make modern too broken and such.
Samite Healer is simple to understand when you read the card, but it really makes combat math a lot more complicated. I think it's clearly a mistake to put a card like that in the 2 player starter decks. They kept reprinting it at common in core sets all the way to Tenth Edition, which just makes me think that the designers had a blind spot for this kind of complexity for a long time.
I think a creature that isn't about attacking and blocking but changes the game with its ability is an important thing to introduce. The game needs to be more than grizzly bears and giant growth. The duel between Prodigal Sorcerer and Samite Healer is fun.
@@pdieraue In a limited environment, Samite Healers take up your complexity budget and limit how many other cards you can make that affect combat math. In this environment you are in control of how much complexity to introduce and Samite Healer could be a good way to do that. I do agree though that once Cedric put it down, I knew an actual new player would be making nothing but mistakes with it.
ohhhh i'm excited to hear your thoughts about this set. probably different from mine. it was the first (only?) set i truly hated, far worse than Fallen Empires or even Homelands. (Chronicles I liked at the time but looking back can see why it was a mistake.)
It felt like it really continued the "Good cards are a thing of the past, now you get this" trend of the previous years, removing the few things that remained in 4th that were actually strong but reasonable. Cards like Serra Angel and Sengir Vampire are good in their day but they aren't Ancestral Recall and Balance. Plus, the artist purge that resulted in entirely new art for everything. That wasn't widely known to the player base at the time but it just felt like something was up and that something wasn't good. Fortunately, Tempest really really righted the ship a few months later.
The reason the simplified Chinese had color coded expansion symbols is because that product was made after they announced they were bringing the rarity-coded expansion symbols to Exodus.
1:24:50 Disappointed the reserve list wasn't brought up when discussing why almost 200 cards not in 4th were added to this edition. Fifth Edition was the first core set released after the creation of the reserve list in 1996 -- I think a lot of the design decisions made in regard to this set (especially in terms of overall size) are related directly to the reserve list.
The main things I remember about 5th ed are that my friends and I mostly ignored it, and that it was irritatingly difficult to distinguish them from 4th ed cards unless they had alternate art.
I actually thought the 30 card decks played very well against each other...except they were marketed towards experienced players and no experienced player would want and have trouble these cards except for City of Brass maybe. Great intro deck experience for brand new players tho except for the swamp and anti wall creatures which literally do nothing.
I know I've made comments about you guys not mana burning before. The thing for me is that the game actually works different depending on which ruleset you're using, old school MTG has some whacky rules and interactions, and under different rules sets they don't work the way they used to. I think most things work they way they're supposed to when you account for the gatherer errata, but I'm not sure about every instance. So, at least theoretically, there are plays you COULD do in the past and might have been relevant, especially in early tournaments, that were major features of the decks in question, and if you use current rules, those things don't work. I do know there are old cards that if you're going off printed text they are completely non-functional with the current rules. There are also some weirdos that technically work, but they don't effectively do anything. That's the only reason I care if you guys track it or not, is to figure out which ruleset you're using. Mana Burn was always a dumb mechanic.
I actually disagree about City of Brass in that Starter deck. I think that's the *perfect* place to put 1 copy of City of Brass. Assuming the new player plays a few games with that deck, they're gonna have the wrong basics for their spells a bunch of the time. Then they'll realize, when they have City of Brass, they *always* have the color they need, and paying 1 life each time they need it is almost always worth it.
It's always funny to me how difficult to pronounce some of these fantasy are for English speakers. Like, they're made up by english speakers, and yet I've never seen a UA-camr who didn't struggle with "svyelun" and "svyelunite", just because it starts with too many consonants. That's so cute from any Nordic/Slavic/German perspective!
A friend who hosts commander has he original feldons cane art in his gameroom. Newer players who come don't understand why us ogs loved the card. Even though it was bad😂
Hard disagree on the 5th Edition arts of Glacial Wall and Flight. These arts capture the emergent properties of magic in-universe and the emergent gameplay of MtG. If you give a zebra the ability to fly why wouldn't it fly around like Superman? If you set up a magical wall of Ice, why would it have to be in an arctic setting? Why not in the desert? 5th Edition Flight is much better at conveying what's going than the Alpha art is. And the zebra and the background are very well rendered. And it's funny. It's the complete package. I hate most art printed after about 2008 or so and like most art up until that point, digital art ruined the way the cards look. So I still like the original Ice Age and Alpha printings of these cards of course. So I love 5th Edition Flight, it makes me so happy looking at it.
I don't think digital art ruined the way the cards look. Digital art can be beautiful and all kinds of styles are possible to recreate digitally as well as new options being opened up. I think what killed Magic art was the strict style guides. Everything has to be the same photo realistic style with the same bright white light source gleaming off every surface. No room for differnt artists to paint the same things differently, no way to have a favourite artist because they're all trying to replicate the exact same style to a fault.
@@kinginthenorth1437 There is a big correlation between the adoption of digital art and the cards looking worse and it's hard for me to believe that it doesn't play a role. The idea that changes in technology or medium has absolutely no impact on art is absurd. There are 3 distinct periods of Magic card art. From 93 up until Mirage, basically randoms from the local art college. From mirage until like 2009-ish where they had established illustrators, and the modern period where everything looks the same. My favorite period is the middle period, but I still love the early stuff too. I can't think of a single new card that is beautiful. Occasionally a set or secret lair will have an, "artist from 20 years ago" theme and those special treatments look nice. But besides from those I hate looking at every new Magic card. I'm not using hyperbole, I hate all of them. I think what happened is that digital artists are a dime a dozen and they realized that people would buy the cards regardless of how they looked. So the art changed. I feel the same way about Pokemon card art. If it's not illustrated by Ken Sugimori it's dogshit.
I agree that you guys dont mana burn on your tournament edition series games... But "Stack Damage" during combat is VERY relevant, especially when you get into the late 90s and early 2000s with all the red deck wins interactions.....
I'm so surprised 4th and 5th edition faired so poorly. I feel like "back in the day"(tm) 4th & 5th were the background jam of the MTG scene. I didn't play with anyone who was a whale or a pro by any standard; so that may have had a lot to do with it. But I felt like * everyone * had a few packs of 4/5 to fluff out their collection. Random grand parents in the street who didn't even play mtg might have a cop white in their pocket by accident. Ok, maybe not, but I feel like the core sets where really valued by a certain audience. People who were consistently spend some money on mtg but rarely, if ever, dropped a bag to REALLY invest in a set. Like, did I want a few cards with phasing, a few cards with horsemanship, a few slivers, or did I want a chance to open a Ball Lightning? Yeah, give me the one that might change my fate as a player please!
Now that I've dived back into mtg nostalgia as an adult, listened to this show a bunch, and thought about it ... me and my friends card buying strategy as kids was really suboptimal. Well, when we were 11,12,13 years old what can you expect. The kind LCS staff TOLD us Ice Age was under powered but we wanted the pretty winter fantasy cards. But as we got into HighSchool we were still doing the "buy a couple of packs from random sets" thing, and also spending $ rummaging through flea market boxes of commons convinced that being able to pick any card we wanted was the deal of the century. By senior year of HighSchool we had figured out better, the real value was to get enough volume from a single set to 1) get synergy cards 2) have a chance at cracking those "rare" cards that only seemed to exist in myth and legend. The last sets I purchased were Mirroden and 5th Dawn, and we did a draft tournament where we kept the decks we made and the prizes were packs and unpicked cards. I remember actually focusing on the current sets and looking to build my card pool around stuff I could get more of.
Fifth Ed. feels like a dumping ground of reprints. Like they wanted to get cards out there for players but weren’t sure of how to do that, and were still reeling from the Chronicles blowback. At the time this set felt lime it was for people who were just getting into the game.
Love these set review videos. The one thing I wish you guys would add is a "Notable Cards" section. Just a section to talk about cards that are interesting for whatever reasons, but might not end up winning any awards at the end.
I absolutely love these set reviews. Patrick's insights and occasional rant sings to my old mtg soul.
words cannot explain how much I enjoyed the card image gallery & chill outro
You guys should add a "Fifth Edition Flight Award for Most Absurd Art"
To be fair to Sleepy Scriptwriter Cedric, Island Sanctuary's art was originally commissioned as a land (along with Birds, the more well known half of this story). Mark Poole was telling us all about it in line at MC Chicago.
Good episode! As an observation about your gameplay videos, when you are using the overhead camera, Cedric is on the left and Patrick is on the right side of the screen. Then, when you change camera views to the face cam, the orientation changes so it looks like Patrick is on the left and Cedric is on the right. It's minorly confusing as a viewer. You might want to consider flipping the overhead camera and the playmat around 180 degrees so the two sides are consistant.
The card image gallery at the end was great! Just like Patrick said it's insanity inducing 😂
These are starting to get interesting now as we are talking about sets that came out after I left Magic. Mirage was the first after my time. Fun to go and hear about them now and what I missed
Great episode!
Do I remember correctly that you guys used to have a most expensive card in the set award (when you were with SCG)? I remember that being one of my favorite awards, I would love if you brought it back!
I haven't been able to find it again but I recall a quote about Necro's inclusion in 5th Edition from one of WotC's design members: "Necro is a fair and balanced card we forsee being in the base set for a long time." I wish I could find that again to verify my memory, but I'm certain that got said. Didn't age well, did it? :p
I loved the idea of mana burn, but losing it was a worthwhile sacrifice to get rid of combat damage on the stack.
I was excited for this set at the time, but mainly because of the new illustration for Black Knight as well as some of the Ice Age reprints. (I started playing around the release of Ice Age and didn't appreciate what I should be looking to get for my collection.)
LETS GET THESE NUMBERS UP !
Honestly, I have always considered the hardest thing in game design to be making the "bad" or inefficient cards due in part to most people's compulsion to make incredibly efficient cards. The balancing act between power levels, set theme/mechanics, and other card designers has to be incredibly hard to maintain a semblance of equilibrium.
I love the circle of protection arts from this set. I understand Patrick's objection that they don't look like white magic, but I think they look beautiful. It probably helps that I started playing around 6th edition, so those are the arts I'm used to.
If Landhome creatures had had the same type of Landwalk that would have been flavorful, and also worth the downside.
Loved this ep. I think 5th Edition is a hidden trove of underrated Magic art. Sure, there were some dubious creations, but the new art for favorites like Unholy Strength, Zombie Master, Earthquake, Goblin King and Bad Moon go pretty hard. Ivory Cup and Lifetap are beautiful as well.
Y'all are certainly entitled to your opinions, but I love this set. I did start around this time, so obviously that skews my pov, but I thought this was a delightful set. They took the base set of cards and removed the genuinely problematic pieces (with, you know, exceptions, but it's an honest attempt) and then included a lot of the most interesting designs from the past few years of expansions. Not every card can be defended, but I think the mentality was good.
And the new art is awesome. Almost universally, they're exciting, iconic pieces.
Finally, I think this is when the formatting and frame really came into focus. Sure, the ruleset isn't quite developed enough yet (and Sixth Edition largely puts is in the zone of modern magic rules and should be lauded for such) but the wording has become professionally consistent and comprehensible in a way 4th edition hadn't quite figured out yet. And the frame is possibly my favorite it's ever been in the history of the game, still looking a lot like early Magic, but bright and clean.
In regards to looking at cards during draw step in edh, it's true, that's the best part of the format lol
The "2-players Starter Deck" match was actually funny !
It's incredibe how long they kept Ritual/Necro around while cutting stuff that has no right to exist with these cards around.
Just want to say, but as the lone player in a group of spikes who LOVES to talk about the art of cards and my relationship with the aesthetics of the game (what reeled me in as a child was how evocative and strange so much of the pieces were), I appreciate the level of detail and insight Patrick brings to discussing the technique and effect of these art changes. Perceptive, concise, clear and funny: couldn't ask for more.
1:24:33 we’re gonna over all 194 cards no we’re not.
I love the deadpan humour and this has been one of my favourite series on UA-cam.
Just wanna say, I am loving this series! You guys are the best to do it! I also love the haircut Patrick
Yeah this series rocks I’m loving learning about the old eras of this awesome game.
I absolutely love the gameplay segment
By this time I was an established tournament player, and we became snobs, we wouldn't use 5th edition cards with that 'weird art' but I liked draft and sealed deck with 5th , which became more popular every month and eventually I grew over it and could use a 5th City of Brass without flinching
I never thought I'd ever see a Terror target a Hill Giant again. Thanks!
Excellent ep!! One thing I'd like to add. The huge number of new artworks was a marketing point for the set, and something they tried to get players excited about. But even if a card did have improved art-let's say I prefered the new Aysen Bureaucrats-I still didn't consider it an upgrade, because it came with a white border and so was a gigantic eyesore no matter how good the art was. I did not want to replace my black bordered cards with any of these! You two brushed past the borders as a non-issue, but white borders were reviled back then and were absolutely a deterrent to purchasing product. This was the first set to came out during my years that (like Patrick) I didn't buy a single pack of.
I think you nail it here. I remember disliking a lot of the new art at the time, but in retrospect a lot of it is actually pretty good. But the white border really sours the whole esthetic. If you pair that same art with a black border it just looks so much better.
MTG content has come and gone for the past 6ish years.. but today I can safely say this is my number 1 series for MTG content ! Keep it up and going guys !
I thought we were gonna talk more about Fungusaur here, am sad we didn’t but also glad that we talked about funnier cards from 5th Edition.
That game was actually surprisingly decent! I was expecting a slog, and it kinda was, but there was also just a lot of playing creatures and punching each other with them XD Which was surprising to me
I imagine this product got significant playtest time to make sure new players experienced the best starting experience possible. Ensuring the game didn't stall and had exciting swings and counters was their job and they did it well.
Loved the gameplay soooo much! Please do more!
8:41 I’ll have to mention I’m a little disappointed that you mentioned The Dark without doing the bit
You guys make the best MTG content around. Always a pleasure to see these in my feed
That two player starter deck thingy I think is the first Magic product I got my hands on as a kid from my older brother.
I wish I could play commander in Patrick's mind palace format, can't wait to see him and Cedric on Shuffle Up EDH
My first set! I think I got a Primal Clay and a Stampede or a Clockwork Beast as rares from the first starter (didn't know it until much later). The art was beautiful, even the basic lands very captivating. I think I got my first Rebecca Guay card in that starter, a Sea Sprite. Some of the instructions were quite difficult to grasp (especially if you didn't know English all that well), but series and batches fairly quickly got replaced by the stack. Can't wait to hear what you think!
Ok, after watching you were kinda harsh, but from a new player's perspective the set was quite exciting. I think that compared to the older cards the clearer templating was a huge step forward, and the new arts from Donato Giancola, Rebecca Guay, D. Alexander Gregory, or Mike Dringenberg really made you want to play with the cards. Even the Animate Wall, with Richard Kane Ferguson deciphering the art is part of the fun. :D
I guess that the Chinese version with expansion symbol indicating rarity must have been printed after they thought of implementing it for Exodus, since Portal, Weatherlight, Tempest, and Stronghold still didn't get that treatment.
I was introduced to Magic through the Portal starter set. We got two decks and the manual walked us through the first game. It was a neat experience but moving on to real Magic was a leap haha... What's an enchantment? What's an artifact?
Absolutely love the image gallery at the end.
5th Edition basics have gorgeous art
I thought Shivan Dragon was so overpowered when I first saw it.
These are fun videos. As a kid I didn't really feel like 5th, or 6th edition were very worthwhile sequels to the ubiquitous 4th- 7th edition felt like an actual step forward with the new art, foils, and return of stronger cards.
Love the added Image Gallery at the end.
1:51:09 I WAS there at the time. When I found out there were no new cards, just new art, I passed.
Oh man, thanks for that info on the rule change around first turn and drawing. I started playing the game in the Ice Age/4th Ed era, stopped playing, and came back to the game around Dominaria. Thought I was crazy and misremembering but apparently there was an actual rules change.
I feel this a lot. I started with Beta, stopped from end of Ice Age until Stronghold, stopped just as 6th came out and came back for a month on MTGO during Innistrad, gave up on the game as cost prohibitive and came back midway through Dominaria United on Arena. I had to unlearn and relearn so much every time and even now can't stop griping about how much the online formats weird deck construction with their specific economic baggage but I've not enough time for even Bo3 on Arena let alone in person Friday nights.
To add on my colorless/generic mana comment. Cedric described Ashnod's Altar as adding two generic mana. Generic mana is not a thing that can be added. It is used in costs to denote that it can be paid with either colored or colorless mana, the only actual mana types.
The distinction is really not that hard when you think about it a little :)
Good time to be rocking the Clippers hoodie
I love the series and I miss you guys in the SCG booth 😢.
Two bits of feedback; first, your transitions between segments feel like they are designed for live syndicated TV networks with a commercial break. There is no need to announce what is “coming up next” and then declare that you are back after a 4 second transition. Just say “we’ll now get into the facts” and go straight into fact #1.
Second, for the play segments, it would feel more natural if you moved the face cam to the other side of the table. That way, the player sitting on the left would be facing the right side of the screen when you cut to the face shot. With your current set up, the two perspectives are mismatched.
Keep them coming! Lots of love
I draw the line at watching starter decks get played against each other.
This isn't "watch a random game of Magic", it's "see what the Magic designers thought was the essence of Magic to bring people into the game". For me it really did capture that simple thrill of threat and answer without any worldbuilding to distract.
I'm surprised the guys weren't familiar with generic mana. It's good WotC made an effort to differentiate generic and colorless mana(since they are two completely different things!) in Oath of the Gatewatch, but it was definitely too late, since there still is so much confusion around the terms.
5th was something else... I remember my LCS owner actively telling people NOT to buy it and he had the same half box of it on his shelf for several years.
Even when mana burn was in the rules, nobody I played with ever used it in games.
Subscribed.
What I initially heard during the video message to Nick Miller (at 2x speed) was “at the Atlanta airport Karakas” which I couldn’t fit in to my understanding of the world.
The card shown at 1:13:04 doesn't actually have the misprint they're talking about. It's not the copyright symbol, it's that the "All rights reserved" bit turns into, "Todos os direitos reservados" on the affected cards. i was a bit confused until I googled it to find an example.
I remember an actual poll wotc did for cards to remove from 4th into 5th, and while most "winners" were going to be gome anyway, like Mind Twist, Cyclopean Mummy was on there too. This is one of the rare "players dont like" situations with teeth!
Also, judges hate 5th edition because in "cleaning up" card wordings they also outright changed some functionality, which no other set since has done.
Also, new art for ankh of mishra is a windmill. Artist said they thought the brief asked for an "ark". Which... explains nothing?
All in all a bit of a disaster.
I love Cyclopean Mummy. The dramatic irony in the flavor text adds an extra layer of horror to a classic movie monster. The name, art, and ability all match the concept too.
1:47:16 The snowy forest looks like a bunch of puffballs instead of trees. Should have stuck with Island Sanctuary
Hurloon Minotaur has my fav flavor text of all time
Another issue with the Xhome cards is....they are like3 90% island home.
WotC hadn't yet decided that Blue should have the best creatures in addition to the best spells like they have now.
@@meekrab9027 Well I meant more, it's funny calling it Xhome when it's pretty much 80% or so island home, with a coulple swamp, forest and mountain homes.
that be like calling reach, green reach or forest reach. Other cards ocasionally have it, but not enough to really make it a new mechanic.
5th, as large as the set was, was smaller than 4th + Chronicles (449 (434 unique) vs 378 (368 unique) + 125 (116 unique) ), so the card pool for Type II actually shrank with this set. Let's see where you guys put it -- I didn't really buy much then -- one starter deck and that was it -- and was not happy about the artwork changes. By this time I had mostly quit playing anything but casually, so I can't really comment on the rules changes as they applied here -- at least I played with the Mirage block.
I didn't actually complete this set until very recently -- I went back and hunted down this set.
And lets face it, the three new sets (vs 4th + Chroncles) integrated into this set were of low interest to players -- Fallen Empires, Ice Age, and Homelands were all still on the shelves.
Finally, I like the card image gallery feature at the end, and that you actually show all the cards.
1:34:27 RKF is a phenomenal artist but his hyper-detailed style doesn't translate well to a tiny box on a playing card. Viewed in a larger format, his pieces are vivid and dynamic in a way that most MtG art isn't. His version of Jade Monolith is incredible.
I overlooked the mummy for years until I recently realized it's a zombie! It does pretty well in an Old School 93/94 Mono B zombie deck alongside Zombie Master.
I've been playing Shandalar recently and some of the cards from the two-player starter are now very familiar to me :D
Shouts out to ced for that GZ sticker, I hope you’re on Marcus’s payroll for that
Timeless is my favorite format on arena. I haven't run into necro decks enough to consider it a "problem," but if enough people play it restricting ritual/necro/both might be on the table one day. As of now I think not enough arena kids know about it
That game was more fun than any modern game with optimized decks.
Sober drinking game: drink whenever the word 'edition' is said without the Spanish twist to it.
The most I remember mana burn ever mattering was when people were playing Eladamri's Vineyard in green decks as ramp that did damage to there opponent. The counterplay being to just run Mishra's Factory in any deck that couldn't consistently use 2 green mana during it's first main phase.
I also genuinely loved the miserable slogs of resource wars that was 90s gameplay until we got the degenerate combo decks which also were hilarious. All my favourite things in Magic have been removed because according to Mark Rosewater, they were unfun and my opponent should get to play cards.
i can think of what design would do, pretty obvious. their job would be to make sure there are enough of each catagory of cards, make sure that they can synergize well, or not TOO well with surounding sets to make modern too broken and such.
Samite Healer is simple to understand when you read the card, but it really makes combat math a lot more complicated. I think it's clearly a mistake to put a card like that in the 2 player starter decks. They kept reprinting it at common in core sets all the way to Tenth Edition, which just makes me think that the designers had a blind spot for this kind of complexity for a long time.
I think a creature that isn't about attacking and blocking but changes the game with its ability is an important thing to introduce. The game needs to be more than grizzly bears and giant growth. The duel between Prodigal Sorcerer and Samite Healer is fun.
@@karlk5801 WotC obviously disagrees with you on this. They haven't printed any new Samite Healers since Abuna Acolyte in 2010.
@@pdieraue In a limited environment, Samite Healers take up your complexity budget and limit how many other cards you can make that affect combat math. In this environment you are in control of how much complexity to introduce and Samite Healer could be a good way to do that.
I do agree though that once Cedric put it down, I knew an actual new player would be making nothing but mistakes with it.
ohhhh i'm excited to hear your thoughts about this set. probably different from mine. it was the first (only?) set i truly hated, far worse than Fallen Empires or even Homelands. (Chronicles I liked at the time but looking back can see why it was a mistake.)
The idea of Chronicles reprints is amazing. The execution was just so bad we regressed the opposite direction into the Reserved List.
It felt like it really continued the "Good cards are a thing of the past, now you get this" trend of the previous years, removing the few things that remained in 4th that were actually strong but reasonable. Cards like Serra Angel and Sengir Vampire are good in their day but they aren't Ancestral Recall and Balance. Plus, the artist purge that resulted in entirely new art for everything. That wasn't widely known to the player base at the time but it just felt like something was up and that something wasn't good. Fortunately, Tempest really really righted the ship a few months later.
I love your videos! The Resleevables is fantastic!
The reason the simplified Chinese had color coded expansion symbols is because that product was made after they announced they were bringing the rarity-coded expansion symbols to Exodus.
1:24:50 Disappointed the reserve list wasn't brought up when discussing why almost 200 cards not in 4th were added to this edition.
Fifth Edition was the first core set released after the creation of the reserve list in 1996 -- I think a lot of the design decisions made in regard to this set (especially in terms of overall size) are related directly to the reserve list.
Without any indication of movement the zebra could be floating or falling.
The main things I remember about 5th ed are that my friends and I mostly ignored it, and that it was irritatingly difficult to distinguish them from 4th ed cards unless they had alternate art.
Who here waiting 2 days early?
Real heads already watched it on Patreon
You did ? Wait ragi
TIL: Jegantha actually has 'generic mana' printed on it.
I did start the game with this set, and was frustrating that the phantom monster would almost always win the game for the Blue black deck.
Set from Before i was born lol
The first set I played with!!
that Mario bad guy at 1:34:42
I actually thought the 30 card decks played very well against each other...except they were marketed towards experienced players and no experienced player would want and have trouble these cards except for City of Brass maybe.
Great intro deck experience for brand new players tho except for the swamp and anti wall creatures which literally do nothing.
I know I've made comments about you guys not mana burning before.
The thing for me is that the game actually works different depending on which ruleset you're using, old school MTG has some whacky rules and interactions, and under different rules sets they don't work the way they used to.
I think most things work they way they're supposed to when you account for the gatherer errata, but I'm not sure about every instance.
So, at least theoretically, there are plays you COULD do in the past and might have been relevant, especially in early tournaments, that were major features of the decks in question, and if you use current rules, those things don't work. I do know there are old cards that if you're going off printed text they are completely non-functional with the current rules. There are also some weirdos that technically work, but they don't effectively do anything.
That's the only reason I care if you guys track it or not, is to figure out which ruleset you're using.
Mana Burn was always a dumb mechanic.
I actually disagree about City of Brass in that Starter deck. I think that's the *perfect* place to put 1 copy of City of Brass. Assuming the new player plays a few games with that deck, they're gonna have the wrong basics for their spells a bunch of the time. Then they'll realize, when they have City of Brass, they *always* have the color they need, and paying 1 life each time they need it is almost always worth it.
peak design was from 5th through stronghold
It's always funny to me how difficult to pronounce some of these fantasy are for English speakers. Like, they're made up by english speakers, and yet I've never seen a UA-camr who didn't struggle with "svyelun" and "svyelunite", just because it starts with too many consonants. That's so cute from any Nordic/Slavic/German perspective!
A friend who hosts commander has he original feldons cane art in his gameroom. Newer players who come don't understand why us ogs loved the card. Even though it was bad😂
Hard disagree on the 5th Edition arts of Glacial Wall and Flight.
These arts capture the emergent properties of magic in-universe and the emergent gameplay of MtG. If you give a zebra the ability to fly why wouldn't it fly around like Superman? If you set up a magical wall of Ice, why would it have to be in an arctic setting? Why not in the desert?
5th Edition Flight is much better at conveying what's going than the Alpha art is. And the zebra and the background are very well rendered. And it's funny. It's the complete package.
I hate most art printed after about 2008 or so and like most art up until that point, digital art ruined the way the cards look. So I still like the original Ice Age and Alpha printings of these cards of course. So I love 5th Edition Flight, it makes me so happy looking at it.
I don't think digital art ruined the way the cards look. Digital art can be beautiful and all kinds of styles are possible to recreate digitally as well as new options being opened up.
I think what killed Magic art was the strict style guides. Everything has to be the same photo realistic style with the same bright white light source gleaming off every surface. No room for differnt artists to paint the same things differently, no way to have a favourite artist because they're all trying to replicate the exact same style to a fault.
@@kinginthenorth1437 There is a big correlation between the adoption of digital art and the cards looking worse and it's hard for me to believe that it doesn't play a role. The idea that changes in technology or medium has absolutely no impact on art is absurd.
There are 3 distinct periods of Magic card art. From 93 up until Mirage, basically randoms from the local art college. From mirage until like 2009-ish where they had established illustrators, and the modern period where everything looks the same. My favorite period is the middle period, but I still love the early stuff too.
I can't think of a single new card that is beautiful. Occasionally a set or secret lair will have an, "artist from 20 years ago" theme and those special treatments look nice. But besides from those I hate looking at every new Magic card. I'm not using hyperbole, I hate all of them.
I think what happened is that digital artists are a dime a dozen and they realized that people would buy the cards regardless of how they looked. So the art changed.
I feel the same way about Pokemon card art. If it's not illustrated by Ken Sugimori it's dogshit.
I agree that you guys dont mana burn on your tournament edition series games... But "Stack Damage" during combat is VERY relevant, especially when you get into the late 90s and early 2000s with all the red deck wins interactions.....
It may be my nostalga speaking here, but how can the scores differ so much from 4E ? If anything, I prefer 5E for the print quality of the cards.
Perhaps rebrand: *"Sleeves Dripping With Sarcasm".*
people complaining about how much better Magic was when mana burn was around will never not be the most annoying thing to listen to
I'm so surprised 4th and 5th edition faired so poorly. I feel like "back in the day"(tm) 4th & 5th were the background jam of the MTG scene. I didn't play with anyone who was a whale or a pro by any standard; so that may have had a lot to do with it. But I felt like * everyone * had a few packs of 4/5 to fluff out their collection. Random grand parents in the street who didn't even play mtg might have a cop white in their pocket by accident. Ok, maybe not, but I feel like the core sets where really valued by a certain audience. People who were consistently spend some money on mtg but rarely, if ever, dropped a bag to REALLY invest in a set. Like, did I want a few cards with phasing, a few cards with horsemanship, a few slivers, or did I want a chance to open a Ball Lightning? Yeah, give me the one that might change my fate as a player please!
Now that I've dived back into mtg nostalgia as an adult, listened to this show a bunch, and thought about it ... me and my friends card buying strategy as kids was really suboptimal. Well, when we were 11,12,13 years old what can you expect. The kind LCS staff TOLD us Ice Age was under powered but we wanted the pretty winter fantasy cards. But as we got into HighSchool we were still doing the "buy a couple of packs from random sets" thing, and also spending $ rummaging through flea market boxes of commons convinced that being able to pick any card we wanted was the deal of the century. By senior year of HighSchool we had figured out better, the real value was to get enough volume from a single set to 1) get synergy cards 2) have a chance at cracking those "rare" cards that only seemed to exist in myth and legend. The last sets I purchased were Mirroden and 5th Dawn, and we did a draft tournament where we kept the decks we made and the prizes were packs and unpicked cards. I remember actually focusing on the current sets and looking to build my card pool around stuff I could get more of.
Love Pat respecting the grift on the design side.
Svylunite = 'Svye-loon-ite'
It's pronounced exactly like it's spelled, just English doesn't have words that use that letter combination.
Fifth Ed. feels like a dumping ground of reprints. Like they wanted to get cards out there for players but weren’t sure of how to do that, and were still reeling from the Chronicles blowback.
At the time this set felt lime it was for people who were just getting into the game.
I want it
I don't know how you can talk about worst new art without mentioning Ankh of Mishra. It's not an Ankh! It's not even close to an Ankh!
Maybe that's Mishra's mistake not wotc's? 🤣
Just for all you young'ns, pro tip: it is only a sign of gamesmanship and respect if loser extends the hand, not the winner.